“Let’s ditch the Explorer and hike down there. See what’s going on.”
“We could lose them coming out...” Kaiser said.
“If they’re stealing oil, we sorta know where they’re going,” Letty said.
They found asemicircular drive where they could park behind a pile of unidentifiable rusting machinery that appeared abandoned, probably oil field equipment. Kaiser got a flashlight from his gear bag, and they hurried out to the street, to find that the tanker had disappeared.
“I’m sure he stopped—they were doing something down there,” Kaiser said.
“Probably pulled off,” Letty said. “If they didn’t, we’ve lost them, so we might as well run down there and find out.”
The moon had come up, slightly fuller than the night before, and the track was so light-colored that they could jog along it. When they were close to the place they’d last seen the tanker, they heard some quiet rattling coming from a long, high shedlike metal building behind an eight-foot chain-link fence. They edged closer, up to the gate, and found a chain loosely wrapped around the gatepost and the leading edge of the gate, and an unlocked combination padlock holding the chain in place.
Kaiser carefully pulled the lock off the chain and whispered, “Need to use my cell phone flashlight.” He turned his back to the gate and holding the padlock against his chest, turned on his cellphone light, allowing a needle point of light to shine through his fingers and onto the padlock. The lock was of the type that required four letters to be aligned: they were currently reading POOH.
“Like Winnie,” Letty whispered.
Kaiser whispered back, “When people go into a place with a lock like this, they don’t scramble the letters until they go back out.”
“Good to know.”
They heard more mechanical noises from the shed, but muffled, as if people were moving carefully, on tiptoe. Kaiser unwrapped the chain and they slipped through the gate, rewrapped the chain, and walked in the dark to the end of the shed.
Both ends of the shed were open and the tanker was parked inside. They were looking at the back of the truck, and saw two men walking along the side of the truck, carrying something that resembled a scuba tank.
“What the hell is that?” Kaiser whispered.
“No idea.”
The men carried the object to the passenger-side door on the truck, and one of them stood on the external step, opened the door, and took out a plastic sack. They pulled the sack over the thing, whatever it was, then one of the men stood on the step and pulled the passenger seat back. The object was at least somewhat heavy, because it took both of them to get it into the truck and behind the seat.
“The thing had some kind of coupling coming out of the end,” Letty whispered. “See that?”
“Yup.”
When the object was in the truck, one man pulled the seat back and climbed inside, while the other man walked around the truck to the driver’s-side door. The truck started, pulled carefully out of the shed. The passenger got out at the gate, pulled it open, and the truck drove through. The passenger wrapped the chain around thegate, locked it, and got back in the tanker, which rolled away down the street.
“Let’s go see what we can see,” Kaiser said.
Using the flashlight, they walked into the shed. There they found an installation of heavy pipes, some of them a foot in diameter, coming out of the ground, running along for fifty feet or so, then disappearing back into the ground. There were several even larger pipes on top, and a number of smaller ones running into short vertical installations.
“A pipeline,” Kaiser said. “How in the heck would they get the oil out of it?”
“There are a lot of thingees here...” Letty said, walking along the installation.
“Good. We just have to find somebody who knows what a thingee is.”
“Vee Wright would know,” Letty said. “Valves. That’s what I was thinking of. Not thingees. Stand back and put some light on this thing, I’ll try to take a picture with my phone.”
They did that. With Kaiser playing his flashlight across the pipes, Letty took a dozen shots from different angles. The photos weren’t great, but you could see the pipes clearly enough.
“Let’s go,” Letty said. “Gotta hope you were right about the POOH.”
Kaiser was correct: POOH opened the lock. They relocked the chains after they were out, and jogged back to the Explorer. As they pulled out of the hiding spot, Kaiser said, “They gotta be an hour and a half from Winks’s. We can probably get there in time to see them unloading...”
“We know where they’re going,” Letty said. “I want to go back to that house, that shack, where they parked their trucks. I want photos of their license tags.”
Kaiser didn’t argue.They headed back to the I-20, took a wrong turn on the way, got lost, found their way back, and turned southwest down I-20. Earlier that night at the Walmart, Kaiser had bought two on-sale black T-shirts and a roll of duct tape. Once they were onto the back roads, he pulled off and taped the shirts over the Explorer’s taillights. A half-hour later, they were approaching the metal shed, which was dark.
